Garden Rail January 2025

The issue of your favourite magazine you are holding will seem a little fatter than usual. Meeting our publishers a couple of months ago, they agreed that as the magazine was doing well (we are bucking the sales trends for paper magazines), my request for more pages could be accommodated. Extra pages mean Dan, our designer, has a challenge to cram the contents list onto this page, but he’s also enjoying the space to really make the photos accompanying our articles look their best. It’s nothing less than you all deserve. I’ve also been able to accommodate some new features – Postcards from… will hopefully appear in every issue. I’m keen to increase the layout content but was always short of space. Now, we can bring you pictures of some…

Recently, in Garden Rail, people have shared their experiences of rising to the challenge of constructing a railway that fits into their garden, without it becoming a dominant feature. Alongside that, there have been writings referring to the opportunities that hosting railway-based meetings are for providing a venue for men (of all ages) to meet and run trains if they wish or just to, well, hang out with their pals. I’m a gardener and also a seventy-one-year-old male. My wife and I have both gardened for all of our married lives. As I approached retirement, I began to take an interest in the mental health challenges for men that losing the rhythm of The Day Job and all of the impact that it has. My railway journey began on Christmas…

The new Accucraft Rheidol has renewed interest in this very attractive narrow gauge 2-4-0T. However, as Phil Parker mentioned in his review in Garden Rail 363, the first 16mm Rheidols were made way back in the 1970s by Stewart ‘Archangel’ Browne. Unlike his pot-boilered Brick and Princess, the Rheidol was internally meths fired with water in the side tanks and a hand pump to top up the boiler. There was a single cylinder between the frames and slip eccentric valve gear. The early locos had a small ⅜” diameter cylinder and gained a reputation for drag racing performances. When Dave Rowlands found out that Stewart was making a new batch of Rheidols with the larger 9/16” diameter cylinder used on the Brick and Princess, we knew this was a much…

Like so many who model garden railways, I dabble in the smaller model railway worlds. My favourite part is always the scenery, where I strive to put in lots of detail. Garden railways are a bit different to indoor modelling, mostly because the models will have to stand up to whatever the weather decides to throw at them. Indoor models don’t tend to have giant cats roaming amongst the scenery, birds the size of houses foraging in the ballast, or hedgehogs taking refuge inside engine sheds! On my previous garden railway, the Lavender Line, I was forever mending the station fencing, clearing the line of debris that birds had flicked onto it and, despite originally being glued to the station platform, righting awaiting passengers from a laying down position. However,…

Lapworth Garden Railway Show Date: 14 December, 2024 Venue: Lapworth Village Hall, Old Warwick Road, Lapworth, B94 6LD Times: 10am to 4pm Web: www.johnsuttonmodels.co.uk East Surrey, all day steaming Date: 15 February, 2025 Venue: de Stafford School, Burntwood Lane, Caterham, Surrey, CR3 5YX Times: 10am to 4pm Web: eastsurrey16mmgroup.wordpress.com Midlands Garden Rail Show Date: ½ March, 2025 Venue: Warwickshire Event Centre, A425, Southam Road, Leamington Spa, CV31 1FE Times: 10am to 4pm Web: www.midlandsgardenrailshow.co.uk The London Festival of Railway Modelling Date: 15/16 March, 2025 Venue: Alexandra Palace, N22 7AY Times: 10am to 5pm Web: www.world-of-railways.co.uk The National Garden Railway Show Date: 12 April, 2025 Venue: NAEC Stoneleigh Park, Kenilworth, CV8 2LH Times: 9:30am to 5pm Web: www.nationalgardenrailwayshow.org.uk All events are published in good faith. Please check with the organisers before…

Last year, I decided that my winter project would be to have a go at making a Garratt locomotive. It would have to be a smaller Garratt, able to negotiate the Radius 1 LGB track curves on my garden layout. I chose the K1 Garratt with its 0-4-0+0-4-0 wheel arrangement and gathered the relevant reference material, photos and drawings. In addition, I also looked at what others had done when making them, including the Accucraft live steam model. My model would be track-powered, so I looked at suitable donor locos and decided on a pair of LGB ‘Otto’ 0-4-0 locomotives, with the rest being scratch-built, using any bits that I could from the donor locomotives. For ease of translating measurements from the plan drawing (from the K Class page on…